"That our friend yonder with the red topknot can live under the water like a fish, and that he wears armor of gold which makes a light in the dark. Look here."
Wright took up the open helmet. Stepping to the switch, he shut off the lights in the laboratory.
Faintly at first, and then strongly and more strongly, the helmet glowed in the darkness. The light grew, until the two men and the girl, standing close together, could dimly see each other's faces.
It was uncanny, this strange metal headpiece with its fan-shaped crest, all luminous with a flickering and phosphorescent radiance.
"What does it?" Rose Emer whispered, the tempest for the time forgotten.
Zenas Wright turned on the lights.
"I cannot tell," he replied. "But if it's not radium, it is something that is closely akin to radium. The outer surface of the helmet is of gold. I've tested it with acids. The gold is laid—not plated, but laid on thickly—over an inner shell of steel. And finely tempered steel it is, too, as my drill will bear me witness. But the light comes from still another metal, which is inlaid upon the tracery in the gold here."
He turned the helmet in his hands. Over all of its surfaces were the fine lines of a design of twining vinery, with here and there small, conventionally shaped flowers. In the lines of the chasing was inlaid, as Wright had said, another metal. It seemed to be a reddish and rusty dust, which clung in the surface of the gold along all of the lines of the graven design. It was that which made the light.
"That chap over there is no actor, and he's not a crazy man," said the geologist earnestly; "but an enigma that I'm going to solve, if the good Lord will give me the time. We had on this ship before he came two survivors of a history to make an archeologist weep tears of joy. Now we have a third, and, to my mind, more wonderful even than are they!
"Boy—" He turned and clapped Polaris on the shoulder. "I only hope that I shall live long enough to pen the 'finis' to the book that I'm going to write some day!"